While Gmail is almost ubiquitous, it’s by no means the only email service we can use. In fact, Outlook is installed on most personal computers, since it is an add-on to Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Before Android’s superiority as a mobile device operating system (with permission from iOS, obviously), Gmail and Outlook competed for the podium as the most widely used email service.
Today we can use a lot of messaging services, but these two are undoubtedly the most used. The problem comes when we use both and we want to sync contacts from Gmail to Outlook or Outlook to Gmail accounts.
Let’s see how to export Gmail contacts to have them in Outlook and then how to export them from Outlook to Gmail.
How to import and export contacts between Gmail and Outlook
- First, on your computer, you need to go to your Gmail account and select Contacts from the drop-down menu at the top left.
- Now click on ‘more’, located in the menu on the left, and choose ‘Export’.
- Currently, in some new versions, exporting is not supported. Go to the old version to get the export option.
- Then you have to choose which contacts to import all contacts, a group or only selected ones. You have three different formats to export them, but the one you are interested in is “Outlook CSV format (to be imported into Outlook or another application)”.
- Then just click on ‘Export’.
- By default, the file will be saved with the name ‘Contacts’, but you can choose the name and location of this file.
- After the export is complete, open the CSV file with Excel if you want to change or correct some contact data. Otherwise, go directly to Outlook to import them.
Import contacts into Outlook
- Now, it’s time to open Outlook and go to the “File” tab.
- In the menu that appears on the left, choose ‘Open and export’.
- From the options below, choose “Import from another program or file”, then “Next”.
- In the next window, select “Comma Separated Values” and, again, “Next”.
- After that, we will choose the CSV file created using the “Browse” option. Choose one of the options that appear (the most convenient would be “Do not import duplicates”).
- In the next window, you need to select ‘Contacts’ as the destination folder (in the Outlook email account you want to import the contacts into, in case you have more than one).
- In the last window, you will have a new option, that of assigning custom fields. This is because some fields in Gmail can match those in Outlook, so we have the option to select and join them, as if it were a card, by dragging the value from the CSV file in the right window to the Outlook control. Window on the left, which we want to assign.
- After that, just click on ‘Finish’ to complete the process.
How to export contacts from Outlook and import them into Gmail
- Now let’s see the reverse operation: choose the contacts from our Outlook account and transfer them to Gmail. As you will see, the process is basically the same, but in reverse, as it makes sense.
- In your Outlook account, open the ‘File’ tab and choose ‘Open and Export’ from the menu on the left, then click ‘Import / Export’.
- In the next dialog box, select “Export to file”.
- After clicking ‘Next’ a new dialog will appear where you should choose ‘Comma Separated Values’ and, of course, ‘Next’.
- Then select “Contacts” in the window and after clicking “Next” choose the name and location to save the exported file. As in the reverse case, you can open this CSV file in an excel sheet, if you want, edit some contacts.
- Now in your Gmail account, select “Contacts” again from the drop down menu on the left.
- On the left side of the screen, open the ‘More’ menu and select ‘Import’.
- Choose the previously saved file and select “Import” so that Outlook contacts will join our Gmail account.
Merge contacts in Gmail
Once the contacts are imported from Outlook, you will notice that a new group called “Imported… (import date)” appears in your Gmail account. This is because this email service does not automatically merge contacts and we have to do it manually as follows:
- Again in the main menu, you need to click on the “More” option and from the options choose “Find and merge duplicates”.
- You will receive a list of all duplicate contacts that Gmail has found that, if in doubt, you can check individually.
- Once you are sure that everything is fine, you just need to click on ‘OK’ and you will finally have combined all the contacts between Gmail and Outlook. At least until you change one of them in one of the two Publishing Services, because the changes will not sync automatically and therefore the changes will not be reflected.
It is about exporting contacts between Gmail account to Outlook account and exporting contacts from Outlook account to Gmail account.
If you have any questions regarding the above methods, please feel free to ask us in the comments below. We will resolve your question ASAP. Additionally, if you know of any other methods to import and export contacts between Gmail and Outlook that are not mentioned in this article, let us know in the comments section below.
Do you think something should be added to this article? Leave your comments below for the desired changes.
What method do you use to import and export contacts between Gmail account and Outlook?
